The Prevention of Orwell

Tonight to the Orwell Prize launch, and a debate on the Condem sabotage of the welfare state. A suit night.

The bare brick walls of the very nice restaurant were awash with Don McCullins and Robert Capas proclaiming War in-a-Paddington!
Access to the bar left much to be desired, with definite health and safety implications for those dying of thirst at the rear of the queue. But the wine and nuts and crisps were tip-top. There were no pashminas or bush-hats, as far as I could see.

"Policy-based evidence-making" (C.G.)

The panel was also impressive. Chris Giles of the Financial Times confirmed that nobody knows what a 'structural deficit' is, and that many of the cuts to benefits could be replaced more fairly and cheaply by a simple increase in income tax and that through its 'policy-based evidence-making' the Condem government is basically no more rational than the Ancient Egyptians, who believed that writing something down made it so. We are seeing that in spades right wing press tries to talk up the economy in the face of predicted plummetting growth projections for the next quarter. If we tell the wolf to go away, he will. If we say our prayers, the Devil won't get us when we sleep. If we stick pins in a wax doll of Recession, it will die.

Lisa Harker, formidable welfare rights hi-flyer, and David Walker, experienced social analyst, both gave their various decimations of the government's lies and deceit and idiocy. And the audience was packed and enthusiastic, but few, it turned out, could demonstrate any sense of affiliation with Orwell's politics, or imagine what he would have thought of the chicanery of the bankers, and the western world's unquestioning, collective, superstitious faith in their voodoo. 

Naturally, this was not the Orwell Appreciation Society, nor the Orwell Liberation Front,  but the Orwell Prize, a benchmark of honesty and clarity, and not necessarily tied to any of Orwell's extreme socialist politics. But nevertheless, If Orwell is to be invoked, his style and character cannot be divorced from his politics, and the silly-clever conservatives who try to paint Orwell as the mortal enemy of socialism because of his attitude to Stalin, sandals, and vegetarians would be advised not to dig themselves too deeply into that hole.

Tonight's examination of the effects of the latest front in the Deficit War was always meant to be a process of counting the damage not planning a response to it, but it might have been an edition of Question Time from Newcastle Under Lyme, for all the attention it paid to the kind of alternative economics which the author of The Lion and the Unicorn would be demanding. We accept that from the BBC, but not from an organisation named after one of Britain's foremost, vocal, unapologetic socialists. Britain's plodding obedience to US Consumerism was taken as read, as was our inevitable obedience to the call for a consumerist war to keep the homes fires burning. The minute attention to detail was predictably immaculate, but the sense was that deckchairs were being re-arranged all over the Titanic. And none of the highly qualified, experienced, respected panel questioned the theory of infinite economic growth - as responsible economists are now starting to. All seemed wedded 'til death to the market system which Orwell, 60 years ago, realised was obsolete and festering. The general impression was of watching a man desperately tinkering with a broken umbrella in a thunderstorm, oblivious to the warm log cabin just behind him. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favor of capitalism. This at a time when the market is less ideologically defensible than ever, and when language has never been more abused in its defence. 
From where I was sitting, the audience seemed to sense this hole in the night, and took out their frustration on poor Patrick Nolan of Reform, who seriously proposed that New Zealand, a barely occupied island paradise, with its economy based on sheep, could provide a viable economic and social model for modern digital multicultural Britain, the oldest industrial society in the world, and then lectured us from that elite political position. Londoners don't cotton to being told how to live by their country cousins. If he hadn't then proceeded to defend the bankers, and banking, he might have got out alive. Luckily for him, Sherriff Jean Seaton stepped in and stopped us riding him out of town on a rail.

In one of the most depressing experiences of a depressing year, I spoke with some bright-eyed young butties from Newport, whose grandparents would have slaved to make the welfare state possible, and who made the down-payments on the socialist future with their labour. This crew were completely unaware of their class-heritage and the nature of exploitation. The political cable connecting them with their history and destiny has been cut at some point in the last 20 years. So all they receive now is just the static background radiation emanating from the mass media. Until eventually I was seriously urged to leave Orwell's politics behind and 'think out of the box'. Their local hero Nye Bevan would be turning in his grave, as would his would-be speech-writer, Orwell.

Until 2008, The Orwell Prize probably was justified in honouring prose from all ends of the political spectrum, on grounds of high journalistic principle. But since then, anyone trying to apologise for the competitive market system is at best lying to themselves, and does not possess 'The Crystal Spirit'. I really don't see how anyone can now defend the market with Orwellian conviction and truthfulness. And to 'turn political writing into an art' requires truth, including genuine belief in one's opinions. The opinion that market forces are still the best way to organise the world is not one many people now agree with, or can write about without squirming. 

All Lies are True, But Some Lies are More Truthful than Others.

Elton John is in the planning stages of a musical version of Orwell's Animal Farm. .
God save us. As if Orwell hasn't been trivialised and distorted and hijacked enough.
It doesn't suggest that Sir Elton has read much more of Orwell than the farmyard fable, or he would have felt Orwell glowering in appalled silence at the idea of yet another anti-socialist tract cobbled together from his work. So I  don't suppose for a second that there's a chance in hell that the show might reclaim the actual conclusion of the book, which is that there is nothing to distinguish the pigs from the farmers. Between Stalin and Churchill, essentially. If it were to undo the myths and lies spun around Orwell's politics, that would be literally fabulous.
In the conclusive great peace conference between businessmen and pigs, Mr Pilkington of Foxwood farm makes a long and significant speech to unanimous approval:

"Their struggles and their difficulties were one. Was not the labour problem the same everywhere? ... "If you have your lower animals to contend with," he said, "we have our lower classes!" This bon mot set the table in a roar; and Mr. Pilkington once again congratulated the pigs on the low rations, the long working hours, and the general absence of pampering which he had observed on Animal Farm. ..And now, he said finally, he would ask the company to rise to their feet and make certain that their glasses were full. "Gentlemen," concluded Mr. Pilkington, "gentlemen, I give you a toast: To the prosperity of Animal Farm!"

Immediately after the peace conference, they all start fighting again. War will continue, and only the rulers will benefit.
Orwell was certainly criticising Stalinist communism in Animal Farm, but more for its betrayal of socialism and its collusion with capitalism than for any ideals or aspirations it might once have had. And whatever generations of misled children of all ages have been told, Orwell was most definitely not attacking socialism for being either unworkable or undesirable. Elton John's vanity project will certainly be both if he fails to appreciate this fact of the text. 
Only weeks ago, George Galloway announced his plans for a musical of the life of Dusty Springfield. Has the world gone mad? Surely the scripts were sent to the wrong addresses. 

Lots of Lovely War

Extract from Diary of a Masher. 1902?

" I had been to see Trooping the Colour at the Queen's Birthday Parade and, as everyone said at a very jolly Army lunch afterwards, it seemed to sum up so much of what was good about this country. Here were soldiers just seven weeks back from Afghanistan, performing manoeuvres with the precision of rhythmic gymnasts, boots sparkling like magnesium, busbies rippling like dominoes as they turned their heads this way and that...

UK politics review of the year 2008 The Ashes: England v Australia live, fifth Test day one Wimbledon 2009: top 50 champions If you took it all together – the happy crowds, the Red Arrows streaking overhead, the beaming Queen, the balmy weather, the London parks generally surging and sprouting with the joy of mid-June – you came away with a sense that God, or someone very like Him, was in His heaven and that all was more or less tickety-boo."

Or was it Boris Johnson in Today's Telegraph drifting off into a Strand Magazine reverie about the World Cup? Either that or HG Wells did invent the time machine. What other explanation is there for gloop like this today?
Apart from the obvious, well-snuffled political opportunities of any major sporting event, this cosy, computer-game vision Britain and the world, where the same certainties are endlessly replayed to a packed, devoted audience, like an eternal Ken Dodd show, reinforces every privilegious delusion of the grand tory vision.
Whether or not the tory party trusts a latter-day Bertie Wooster to mould its image will confirm whether it too has totally lost its marbles.
The other effect of this passage is, obviously, to glorify war. The casual, decorative 'boots sparkling like magnesium, busbies rippling like dominoes' - the leisurely association of war and sport - the mundane presence of war planes over London, as normal and patriotic as Red Routemaster buses.. all designed to perpetuate the myth of Gallant Little Britain. Always ready to see of the bosche, or whichever Johnny Foreigner cuts up rough - what? In other words, the state of permanent war we are in now, and were in at the mental time of Johnson's prose, during the height of empire.
How could anyone reading Johnson's Chronicles ever be fully aware of the reality of the war we are in? One in which war itself is the objective, not victory.
We are now in Orwell's 1984 world of a few almost identical mega-powers, scraping tectonic plates and generating wars like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and tsunami along their edges. This is essential to the Earth as a living planet, but disastrous for those crushed and drowned in the process.
But an ecconomic system created by humans is not a geological inevitability. It is something we should change for the better. Only those who benefit from the suffering would complain.

Political Reform - The Red Tape Revolution

More committees and a cull of MP's. That'll solve the problem, according to the politicians and Esther Rantzen. Plus of course a routine moral regeneration resulting in everyone becoming nice and responsible and decent and dutiful overnight. Happens all the time.
Naturally, a recession mentality is different, being forged by deprivation rather than gluttony. And the culture it creates may well deliver more status for social duty than before, when those not lining their pockets were merely a bunch of suckers and losers. But for as long as the profit motive rules, politicians will be bent, and the public will have to judge as best they can.
Individuals now have more power of information than ever. The concept of counter-veillance is here, as seen in the G20 protests. And the steam train is no longer the fastest means of communication. So we do not need the same forms of political representation we did when most people still lived a days trainride from delivering a petition to anyone who could make a difference. We don't need the same form of delegated politician, we need more access to the decision-making process itself.
For the time being, we have the technology and the infrastructure to restore an element of the community camp-fire to politics and economics. And restore some of the trust between people which has now almost completely vanished. And save the planet a bit.
If that technology can put the first black man in the White House, it can surely help restore the balance in favour of those deserving community interests hitherto out-priced and out-lobbied from power by vast commercial interests. We are facing a deep ideological choice between the politics of the last 200 years, and a politics which can see us through the next 200 years.

As the socialist George Orwell said:

"I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue."

Cockamamie Little Protests in London & Athens

The weekend's blockade of Stansted Airport by 'Plane Stupid' has ended with 57 arrests and 50 flights cancelled. So far, nobody has actually used the immortal words 'Cockamie Little Protest', but a BBC newswonk came close when he wearily droned:

"Actions like this only delay people getting on with their lives."

What he still fails to realise is that this kind of inconvenience is just a taste of a future which will see everyone's lives drastically interfered with, whatever happens. It is a fact of Life as we have contrived it since the invention of the steam engine.

The Bangkok airport protests by the so-called 'People's Alliance for Democracy' showed how enough people acting together can achieve their goals. It just so happens that the PAD's goals are squalid and backward, But they are real enough, and their effects even more so.

The respectable suburbians living under the Heathrow flightpath are vowing to take direct action should their objections to new runway be ignored. Some of them may well be more concerned with the already plumetting value of their homes, but there is no doubt that their objections are valid, and many are now citing global warming as a case against airport expansion.

The ongoing riots in Greece show just how angry young people can get at the kind of police we can expect from a state determined to defend a destructive economic system from the consequences of itself. It just so happens that the goals of some Pixie anarchists are more vendetta than Declaration of Human Rights, but their actions are indisputably real, and are also a vision of future clashes when tensions between state and society will be much greater.

These are all actions of people working together to achieve their goals, however debased or misguided. Acting in a shared spirit of fellow-feeling, so how much more successful and attractive should goals be which are in everyone's long-term interest, and that of their descendants?
Governments should therefore take time to inspect the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights they signed up to, with its intention that people should be encouraged to co-operate with each other, a not merely delegate governments to do so on their behalf - with other governments and bureaucracies.
Article 1.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

But how will governments understand what they have committed themselves to if they do not know what 'brotherhood' means? And how will they find out what brotherhood means if they are unable to realise that ending the ruinous consumer orgy will take more mass 'brotherhood' than at any time in history? And how will they prevent more cities from burning if they cannot demonstrate that they are acting in the interest of the people, not profiteers? That they know what brotherhood means - however unfashionable the word is to the sneering sophisticates who have cleverly engineered our current economic and environmental crisis. If it at convinces some of them that the rest of the world matters, Global Warming might almost be worthwhile.
As for the most interesting definition of brotherhood, it is best left, as usual, to George Orwell, writing in 1943, when the world was just as uncertain as it is now.

Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.